NEW YORK — Stripped of hurricane rank, Tropical Storm Irene spent the last of its fury Sunday, leaving treacherous flooding and millions without power — but an unfazed New York and relief that it was nothing like the nightmare authorities feared.
Slowly, the East Coast surveyed the damage, up to $7 billion by one private estimate, and worried of danger still lurking: the possibility of rivers and streams swelling with rainwater and overflowing over the next few days.
"This is not over," President Barack Obama said from the Rose Garden.
Meanwhile, the nation's most populous region looked to a new week and the arduous process of getting back to normal.
New York lifted its evacuation order for 370,000 people and said it hoped to have its subway, shut down for the first time by a natural disaster, rolling again Monday, though maybe not in time for the morning commute. Philadelphia restarted its trains and buses.
"All in all," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, "we are in pretty good shape."
At least 15 people died in the storm, most of them when trees crashed through roofs or onto cars.
Two pillars of the neighborhood came through the storm just fine: The New York Stock Exchange said it would be open for business on Monday, and the Sept. 11 memorial at the World Trade Center site didn't lose a single tree.
The center of Irene passed over Central Park at midmorning with the storm packing 65 mph winds. By evening, with its giant figure-six shape brushing over New England and drifting east, it was down to 50 mph. It is expected to drift into Canada early Monday.
Twenty homes on Long Island Sound in Connecticut were destroyed by churning surf. The torrential rain chased hundreds of people in upstate New York from their homes and washed out 137 miles of the state's main highway.
Rivers roared in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In Rhode Island, which has a geography thick with bays, inlets and shoreline, authorities were worried about coastal flooding at evening high tide.
The storm system knocked out power for 4½ million people along the Eastern Seaboard. Power companies were picking through uprooted trees and reconnecting lines in the South and had restored electricity to hundreds of thousands of people by Sunday afternoon.
Under its first hurricane warning in a quarter-century, New York took extraordinary precautions. There were sandbags on Wall Street, tarps over subway grates and plywood on storefront windows.
The subway stopped rolling. Broadway and baseball were canceled.
Max Mayfield, former director of the National Hurricane Center, called it a textbook case.
"They knew they had to get people out early," he said. "I think absolutely lives were saved."
Mayfield credited government officials — but also the meteorologists. Days before the storm ever touched American land, forecast models showed it passing more or less across New York City.
In the storm's wake, hundreds of thousands of passengers still had to get where they were going. Airlines said about 9,000 flights were canceled.
In the South, authorities still were not sure how much damage had been done. North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue said some parts of her state were unreachable. TV footage showed downed trees, toppled utility poles, mangled power lines and awnings.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell had initially warned that Irene could be a "catastrophic" monster with record storm surges of up to 8 feet. But the mayor of Virginia Beach, Va., suggested on Twitter that the damage was not as bad as feared, as did the mayor of Ocean City, Md.
One of two nuclear reactors at Calvert Cliffs, Md., automatically went offline because of high winds. Constellation Energy Nuclear Group said the plant was safe.
"Whether we dodged a bullet or you look at it and said, ‘God smiled on us,' the bottom line is, I'm happy to report, there do not appear to be any deaths attributable to the storm," Bloomberg said.
New York officials could not pinpoint when the trains would run again but warned that the Monday commute would be rough. The New York subway carries 5 million riders on an average weekday.
In Philadelphia, the mayor lifted the city's first state of emergency since 1986. The storm was blamed for the collapses of seven buildings, but no one was hurt and everyone was accounted for.
The 15 deaths attributed to the storm included five in North Carolina, four in Virginia, two in rough surf in Florida, and one each in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Irene was the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental U.S. since 2008, and came almost six years to the day after Katrina ravaged New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005.
As the East Coast cleans up, it can't afford to get too comfortable. Off the coast of Africa is a batch of clouds that computer models say will probably threaten the East Coast 10 days from now, Mayfield said. The hurricane center gave it a 40 percent chance of becoming a named storm over the next two days.
"Folks on the East Coast are going to get very nervous again," Mayfield said.
When Catherine Haas, a senior majoring in social work, turned right on a red light at the intersection of 56th Street and Fowler Avenue during her freshman year, she said she didn't think twice about it.
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